Mawaru Penguindrum
Dec. 6th, 2013 03:14 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
type_wildThere are things I have watched or read because they're considered classics. There those I got into because I've liked some other work by the same creator. Finally, there are those that somehow made a name for themselves in spite of the seeming absurdity of the concept. Mawara Penguindrum technically goes under all three, but mostly the last one. "Penguindrum", come on.
That said, google tells me that popular reception is mixed. Is it a brilliant work of astounding philosophical depth that conveys its ideas through a veil of symbolism and a visual product unmatched by anything ever, or is it a pretentious narrative turd which tries to mask its clichés and incoherent plot by vomiting colour and J-pop all over the audience?
The internet jury is still out, but I loved it.
The story rather defies description beyond the first episode setting up the conflict, but I can give you that, at least:
Sixteen year old Kanba is a suave ladykiller, while his twin brother Shouma is your nice-but-kind-of-a-doormat anime guy who is steamrolled by just about everyone in his life. Himari is their younger sister, who is the same younger sister that is in every anime ever, complete with a mysterious ailment which renders her the fragile object of her brothers' protection. It should not be necessary to point out that the only thing we see of their parents are harmonious family photos. Our story starts as Himari dies.
But then! She is brought back to life by a mysterious entity from the beyond your comprehension, which possesses Himari through a penguin-shaped souvernir hat! Why? Who the heck knows, but its demand is clear: if Himari is to live, Kanba and Shouma must aquire the penguindrum.
The story is the hunt for the penguindrum - no, we're not told what it is, but it is (probably) in the possession of Ringo Oginome. Ringo is the same age of Kanba and Shouma, and has a diary that foretells her destiny and as it happens, Ringo's destiny is to be with Kanba and Shouma's science teacher. Unsurprisingly, Kanba and Shouma are not the only ones who are after that diary. Already from the get-go, it is clear that Kanba has some particular connection to the whole penguindrum business, while it falls to Shouma to - well, stalk the stalker and try to wrestle that diary out of her hands.
This is all the known up through episode 2-3-ish. Giving any kind of example of what makes Mawara Penguindrum so damn good would be a spoiler, but it goes philosophical and it goes surreal. I don't know where any other viewer expected it to end up, but I can speak for myself, and I guess I expected an ending something along the lines of what we got. But the exact details of it, and the journey there - yeah, that was a road paved with WAIT, WHAT. (for an aproximate map, see here.) Suffice it to say that not a single thing in this story is what it seems. The opening narration of the first episode starts with one of our main characters stating that " [he] hates fate", and Mawaru Penguindrum is a story that boldly claims themes such as destiny and the defiance of such, the existence of the ego among a billion other egos, the fate of unloved children, the sins of the fathers and towards the end, the reason why we choose to live. Towering over all of them is the question of family, in a variety of incarnations.
Mawara Penguindrum sprung from the same mind as Revolutionary Girl Utena did, and this played a not insignificant part in my decision to buy it. Interestingly, trying to explain the difference between Utena and Penguindrum required me to remember literary terminology I don't use a whole lot in my daily life. Both stories are decidedly weird and both of them make use of heavy visual symbolism. They are different not so much in the amounts of weirdness as in their attitude to it: Utena can accept a lot of its insanity on the argument of genre alone (it's Magical Girl, course there is a castle floating upside-down in the sky), and bases so much of its storytelling on allegory that the viewer who wants to hang on has to accept that there is probably some secondary meaning to girls turning into cows. In Penguindrum, the insanity is clearly recognised as insane, most pressingly by Shouma who has to put up with Ringo and her increasingly deranged attempts at seducing his homeroom teacher. In Penguindrum, the weirdness is clearly connected to the supernatural and treated as such up until a certain point.
The potential problem is that after this point, it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is a symbol, what is hallucination and what is manipulation of reality. The Child Broiler is obviously a symbol of society's faults at dealing with children, but then also a real place where children are taken in trucks that other children can chase after barefeet? The weirdness in the clip above are nothing to the mindfuck of the second half of the story. Penguindrum starts out as a lot less [in-universe] surreal than Utena, but sanity goes out of the window after the middle part has been reached. When the story is driven by drama whose meaning is largely delivered by visual symbols and narrative parallels, and when understanding its message relies on recognising and correctly interpreting numerous references to other works, it's completely understandable that parts of the audience gets lost somewhere.
That said, Mawaru Penguindrum makes it very, very clear that there's method to its madness. Pick any episode at random, watch five minutes of it, and you'll know exactly how much subtlety there is around. That is to say: none. Mawaru Penguindrum is a story that could not have been told in any other medium than animation, because everything, everything, is way over the top. The story that unravels is gigantic. The characters and their relationships to each other are likewise blown out of proportion, though not very much more than is usual in anime. The animation is bright, frequently caricatured, makes use of an exaggerated amount of contrast and whatnot. The directing is likewise done to the point of parody, and as for the music-
Yeah.
The genius of Mawaru Penguindrum is that exactly the ridiculous overstatement of everything that happens is what holds the hand of the audience as we are pulled deeper into the unspoken parts of the story. Since the presentation is so bombastic about its surreal elements, it becomes impossible to miss the numerous clues about the parts of the story that remain (verbally) unmentioned. My emotional response to particularly the latter part of the anime was essentially "I've no idea what's going on, but it's awesome". The volumes of meta that exists on the internet is also an indication about the same: Wherever people talk about this, they're either declaring their giving up on it, or analyzing it at length. I've seen mostly the latter.
I'll leave it for others to debate whether the extensive use of symbolism and intertextuality by definition means that Mawaru Penguindrum is pretentious and unnecessarily complicated. What I do know is that I loved that part of it, and that I'm awed by how Ikuhara managed to... honestly, I don't know. He either took something ridiculous or managed to make it profound, or he took some serious social criticism and philosophical musing and managed to make it hilarious. Either way, it's a brilliant piece of animation and it is a beautiful story about the necessity of love and of a functional family.
That said, google tells me that popular reception is mixed. Is it a brilliant work of astounding philosophical depth that conveys its ideas through a veil of symbolism and a visual product unmatched by anything ever, or is it a pretentious narrative turd which tries to mask its clichés and incoherent plot by vomiting colour and J-pop all over the audience?
The internet jury is still out, but I loved it.
The story rather defies description beyond the first episode setting up the conflict, but I can give you that, at least:
Sixteen year old Kanba is a suave ladykiller, while his twin brother Shouma is your nice-but-kind-of-a-doormat anime guy who is steamrolled by just about everyone in his life. Himari is their younger sister, who is the same younger sister that is in every anime ever, complete with a mysterious ailment which renders her the fragile object of her brothers' protection. It should not be necessary to point out that the only thing we see of their parents are harmonious family photos. Our story starts as Himari dies.
But then! She is brought back to life by a mysterious entity from the beyond your comprehension, which possesses Himari through a penguin-shaped souvernir hat! Why? Who the heck knows, but its demand is clear: if Himari is to live, Kanba and Shouma must aquire the penguindrum.
The story is the hunt for the penguindrum - no, we're not told what it is, but it is (probably) in the possession of Ringo Oginome. Ringo is the same age of Kanba and Shouma, and has a diary that foretells her destiny and as it happens, Ringo's destiny is to be with Kanba and Shouma's science teacher. Unsurprisingly, Kanba and Shouma are not the only ones who are after that diary. Already from the get-go, it is clear that Kanba has some particular connection to the whole penguindrum business, while it falls to Shouma to - well, stalk the stalker and try to wrestle that diary out of her hands.
This is all the known up through episode 2-3-ish. Giving any kind of example of what makes Mawara Penguindrum so damn good would be a spoiler, but it goes philosophical and it goes surreal. I don't know where any other viewer expected it to end up, but I can speak for myself, and I guess I expected an ending something along the lines of what we got. But the exact details of it, and the journey there - yeah, that was a road paved with WAIT, WHAT. (for an aproximate map, see here.) Suffice it to say that not a single thing in this story is what it seems. The opening narration of the first episode starts with one of our main characters stating that " [he] hates fate", and Mawaru Penguindrum is a story that boldly claims themes such as destiny and the defiance of such, the existence of the ego among a billion other egos, the fate of unloved children, the sins of the fathers and towards the end, the reason why we choose to live. Towering over all of them is the question of family, in a variety of incarnations.
penguindrumdub from torchika on Vimeo.
Mawara Penguindrum sprung from the same mind as Revolutionary Girl Utena did, and this played a not insignificant part in my decision to buy it. Interestingly, trying to explain the difference between Utena and Penguindrum required me to remember literary terminology I don't use a whole lot in my daily life. Both stories are decidedly weird and both of them make use of heavy visual symbolism. They are different not so much in the amounts of weirdness as in their attitude to it: Utena can accept a lot of its insanity on the argument of genre alone (it's Magical Girl, course there is a castle floating upside-down in the sky), and bases so much of its storytelling on allegory that the viewer who wants to hang on has to accept that there is probably some secondary meaning to girls turning into cows. In Penguindrum, the insanity is clearly recognised as insane, most pressingly by Shouma who has to put up with Ringo and her increasingly deranged attempts at seducing his homeroom teacher. In Penguindrum, the weirdness is clearly connected to the supernatural and treated as such up until a certain point.
The potential problem is that after this point, it becomes impossible to tell what is real and what is a symbol, what is hallucination and what is manipulation of reality. The Child Broiler is obviously a symbol of society's faults at dealing with children, but then also a real place where children are taken in trucks that other children can chase after barefeet? The weirdness in the clip above are nothing to the mindfuck of the second half of the story. Penguindrum starts out as a lot less [in-universe] surreal than Utena, but sanity goes out of the window after the middle part has been reached. When the story is driven by drama whose meaning is largely delivered by visual symbols and narrative parallels, and when understanding its message relies on recognising and correctly interpreting numerous references to other works, it's completely understandable that parts of the audience gets lost somewhere.
That said, Mawaru Penguindrum makes it very, very clear that there's method to its madness. Pick any episode at random, watch five minutes of it, and you'll know exactly how much subtlety there is around. That is to say: none. Mawaru Penguindrum is a story that could not have been told in any other medium than animation, because everything, everything, is way over the top. The story that unravels is gigantic. The characters and their relationships to each other are likewise blown out of proportion, though not very much more than is usual in anime. The animation is bright, frequently caricatured, makes use of an exaggerated amount of contrast and whatnot. The directing is likewise done to the point of parody, and as for the music-
Yeah.
The genius of Mawaru Penguindrum is that exactly the ridiculous overstatement of everything that happens is what holds the hand of the audience as we are pulled deeper into the unspoken parts of the story. Since the presentation is so bombastic about its surreal elements, it becomes impossible to miss the numerous clues about the parts of the story that remain (verbally) unmentioned. My emotional response to particularly the latter part of the anime was essentially "I've no idea what's going on, but it's awesome". The volumes of meta that exists on the internet is also an indication about the same: Wherever people talk about this, they're either declaring their giving up on it, or analyzing it at length. I've seen mostly the latter.
I'll leave it for others to debate whether the extensive use of symbolism and intertextuality by definition means that Mawaru Penguindrum is pretentious and unnecessarily complicated. What I do know is that I loved that part of it, and that I'm awed by how Ikuhara managed to... honestly, I don't know. He either took something ridiculous or managed to make it profound, or he took some serious social criticism and philosophical musing and managed to make it hilarious. Either way, it's a brilliant piece of animation and it is a beautiful story about the necessity of love and of a functional family.
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no subject
Date: 2017-02-25 06:02 pm (UTC)(And if you haven't seen this Penguindrum vid to audio from the British fake educational series Look Around You, I highly recommend it. It makes about as much sense as the original does.)
no subject
Date: 2017-02-26 02:15 pm (UTC)It made my world a better place, for sure.